Overview

Dual Racer - Ferrari and Fuel

Ferrari has always stood for passion and romance, Shell delivers power and performance, making this the perfect partnership.

Challenge

Maximise visibility and awareness of Shell’s partnership with Scuderia Ferrari among target customers to drive increased brand preference and generate further volume sales.

Position Shell as the technology and quality leader.

Provide a platform to communicate the “Track to Road” message to support Shell V-Power premium fuels and Shell Helix Ultra synthetic lubricants.

Enhance relations with key stakeholders – business, resource holders, media and staff.

Approach

Our approach was to redefine the Shell motorsport experience. To set a new standard to which others aspire.

Expand brand affinity and drive wider awareness with target audiences for V-Power and Helix via the Scuderia Ferrari partnership. To do so, demonstrate an increase in awareness of and greater depth of understanding about the partnership.

Improve levels of digital engagement with target audiences by making the interaction with Shell Motorsport more responsive, real-time and user-centric.

Drive growth in the overall Shell Motorsport community via a foundation of content developed with sharing and virality as key performance metrics.

Provide an evolution that performs - for example: Communicating the technology via the science - to - Communicationg the technology via the passion or, moving from standalone communications, such as trackside advertising to Integrated digital communication - social media during LIVE races.

Bringing the data, research, and understanding around brands together in a coherent and meaningful way took some time and convincing, as both parties saw their information as proprietary. To address this, we delivered a learning hub where each side’s data could remain separate while informing centrally co-owned content built from each dataset.

My team started with a discovery phase, focusing on two key areas: landscape and audience. From this research, we understood that the convergence of paid, owned, and earned media provided the opportunity to achieve word-of-mouth at scale. However, this was only possible if the activity was as close to real-time as possible, which posed a challenge for the team due to the nature of data collection and dissemination for both brands.

Breaking down real-time further, we identified three areas to deliver against: analytics, which involved social monitoring; paid media, which aimed to amplify and extend conversations; and community management, which focused on creating and curating content and engaging the community.

A major learning we made as we started to open up conversations in real-time is that “you don’t have to create everything.” Fans and enthusiasts who love the brand were sharing amazing photos and stories about the brand every day. In fact true engagement only happened when conversations were curated using original fan content.

Secondly, we examined the audience and uncovered some key facts. Successfully appealing to a larger audience was crucial for achieving Shell’s objectives. However, the audience interested in Shell’s partnership with Scuderia Ferrari was not monolithic, with varying levels of interest in Scuderia Ferrari, Formula One, and motorsport in general. Shell’s technical messages primarily appealed to the most enthusiastic and knowledgeable Formula One and motoring enthusiasts. Communicating this to the internal Shell and Ferrari teams was challenging, as both held strong beliefs in the broad appeal of their brands among their customers. Changing hearts and minds with the client was as important to driving new engagement with customers.

The audience as with all customer groups had many varied layers, we were able to clarify these from a hardcore central TIFOSI (Ferrari core) out to Car enthusiasts (Shell core). Finding the right means to amplify Motorsport content to these audiences in a way that would genuinely connect with them was to be a key imperative of our strategy.

Research allowed us to understand that car Enthusiasts, by definition, aren’t very passionate about Formula One. But the passion of the inner audience layers (Armchair F1 viewers / Avid F1 fans and TIFOSI) is transferable. In the right form, it could excite the Car Enthusiasts. The imperative was finding the right form of content, and delivering it in the right way, then pushing the passion outward.

The hypothesis we came to was: Passion of Ferrari + Performance of Shell = Power of Spirit

Positioning the brand

To achieve our objectives, we established a dedicated channel devoted to Formula One, demonstrating the courage and conviction to be different. Our goal was to create a brand that speaks from the heart and owns the conversation.

Creating an experience

We aimed to own the conversation and position people at the heart of the experience. Our strategy was designed to drive dialogue and opinion, creating a world-class and memorable presence. We ensured our approach was platform agnostic, providing a connected experience across various channels.

The Creative Approach

I assembled a small team of creatives, developers, and brand specialists in a “War Room” to develop the necessary creative approach. We established a simple set of rules to guide our work: desirable, memorable, and shareable. We also developed design principles to serve as guardrails for all initiatives across Edelman, Ferrari, and Shell. These principles were: we aim to be intuitive but surprising; every touch counts; our designs are created with the world in mind; and we are committed to developing a dialogue.

Initially, Shell was reluctant to adopt these principles, believing its own brand versions were adequate. This, however, caused friction with Ferrari, who believe in winning using the best method. Through a test-and-learn framework for all creative solutions, I was able to drive a conversation that changed Shell’s viewpoint.

Outcomes

We developed three key initiatives: “100 Reasons to Believe,” featuring short filmic human stories; “Dual Racer,” offering compelling interaction and gameplay; and “The Insider,” providing behind-the-scenes editorial content.

Converged media – owned, paid, and earned activity all happening concurrently and fuelling one another in real-time were keys to success.

People don’t “Like” branded content. They like great content. So our investment was in driving amplification of great content, where it originates.

If it’s not visual, it hardly matters. All conversations were visualised in some way, this was a fundamental learning, that stiories are told by mixed messaging, not one or another.

Our success was not reliant on having one big platform. It was about making the most of the roughly 50 touches we had with each community member during the year. This also spread across many channels and touchpoints, digital and physical were as important as each other.

Start with mobile, then worry about the broader digital channels.

Formula One fans can be a lonely bunch, but they craved the chance to come together. Within the online conversation about Formula One, we found and occupied the white space to entertain and bring fans together in a way that drove amplification.

Looking at audience segments, amplify the passion outwards - we discovered that a push method was far more effective of engagement and leant on the fierce passion within the F1 community.

Dual screening presents a massive opportunity - having differing content across devices is a great driver of focussed engagement

The “always on” content strategy, linked to audience self-identification, was a massive success throughout the campaign, driving millions of views to long-burn content. For car enthusiasts, we achieved this by understanding their digital content search criteria, which our research revealed as a key factor in how they self-identify. Searches such as “car wash,” “polish a car,” “change oil,” and “change a tyre” were used as trojans for F1-driven content. We created content featuring the Ferrari team performing these tasks, capturing amusing perspectives during pre-existing filming or event opportunities. The result was a series of simple ‘how to’ films showing the Ferrari F1 team changing oil, polishing out scratches, or even replacing entire body kits. These amusing films burned slowly but steadily, often spreading virally and reaching a much wider audience than other content, including live F1 races.

Over a 50-week period of engagement, including an entire F1 season, we achieved remarkable results. The “Power of Spirit” ecosystem saw over 4 million image uploads. Our YouTube channel experienced growth of over 23%, with individual watch figures exceeding 200,000 per video and “always on” content gaining over 500,000 views per video. Subscriber numbers increased by more than 420,000 throughout the campaign, only slightly declining as content creation eased at the end of the engagement.

The “Dual Racer” in-game engagement reached over 150,000 live participants in a single race, generating over 5 million tweets, averaging 30 tweets per user during engagement. The app achieved a sticky time percentage of 35% during single F1 races, surpassing any other app usage during the same period. Thius did not account for time using twitter for messaging, pushing percentage ownership of apptime to over 50%.

Shell have seen an increase in brand awareness and engagement with differing fuel types and products used and explained throughout the campaign.

Role

Creative Director / Design / Client C-Suite engagement / Pitch

Team

Managing Director, Digital, EMEA / Account Director / Head of Delivery / Manager, Insights & Analytics / Account Executives (5) / Shell Global Client Relationship Manager / Account Director / Senior Account Manager, Edelman Mobile / Head of Search, EMEA / Senior Technical Developer / Design (3) / Tech (3)

Company

Edelman Digital (London) / Edelman PR Global / Edelman Social Global